Scandals signal Gonzales must go

[struggle4progress]

Freedom Newspapers
Created on: March 20, 2007 - 11:24PM - 10200

... The extent to which these actions presume the president’s wartime powers are so expansive that they may override existing law and longstanding moral scruples is highlighted in the 2002 Bybee memorandum which Gonzales and White House counsel requested from the Office of Legal Counsel. That memorandum suggested existing U.S. laws outlawing torture might be unconstitutional if they encroached on the president’s power to conduct a military campaign. This kind of reasoning flew in the face of Supreme Court precedent — that the president’s power is at its minimum when Congress has legislated on a subject — and was repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, where the court made clear that a state of war does not give the president a blank check ...

Winking and nodding at torture or near-torture has confused those soldiers who must implement these policies in the field and contradicted the U.S. Army Field Manual, which categorically prohibited torture and coercion. Whether or not the instances of forcible interrogation that came to light at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were caused by the efforts of Gonzales and others to find ways around U.S. laws and international conventions against torture, they have served to discredit the United States and undermine domestic and international support for military and other efforts directed against international terrorists.

Alberto Gonzales has consistently sought to enhance executive power, pushing it into questionable realms like near-torture and wiretapping Americans without a warrant, in service to a view of presidential wartime power that is almost absolute. To be sure, he has apparently done this at the behest of the president he serves. But executive overreaching has engendered the kind of backlash America’s founders, who hoped different branches of government would check overreaching by other branches, anticipated, making Gonzales’ position politically as well as philosophically untenable.

It is time for him to go.

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